State Department Condemns Thailand Attack, Suggests Iran Link

US State Department(WASHINGTON) -- State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland condemned the explosions in Thailand Tuesday. Though she never offered a direct link, she drew a parallel between the blasts in Bangkok and the attacks on Israeli officials in India and Georgia, which Israel has blamed on Iran. Nuland said it was reprehensible that states and nonstate actors (Hezbollah) resort to terrorism as “a legitimate foreign policy tool.”

She did not directly link Tuesday’s attacks in Thailand with Monday’s attacks against Israeli diplomats, as the blasts are currently under investigation.

“However,” Nuland said, “we do note that they come on the heels of other disrupted attacks that do have Iranian fingerprints on them.”

“What I would say is that with regard to this bombing, the incidents in Delhi, incidents in Georgia, while we will await the results of the investigations, these events do come on the heels of other disrupted attacks targeted at Israel and Western interests, including an Iranian-sponsored attack in Baku, Azerbaijan and a Hezbollah-linked attack in Bangkok, Thailand, before this,” she said.

So does that mean the United States agrees with Israel’s assertion that Iran is guilty?

“We seem to have an uptick in this kind of violence,” she said. “We’re concerned about it. Some of these have been linked to Iran. With regard to these recent ones, we’re going to await the results of the investigation, but we are looking at the links.”

So is it possible that Iran and Israel are engaged in a proxy war against each other?"We are concerned about use of international terrorism by Iran or by anybody else against Israel or against any other innocents and about a spike in the number of incidents that we’ve seen,” Nuland answered.

But Nuland couldn’t escape the linkage language.

“The point is,” she said, “that it is not an accident, that we are now drawing connections, that we are concerned, all right, that we are concerned that there has been a recent aggressive spike in use of terror as a weapon.”